Event and Ticketing Details
Dates & Times
Monday 20 March
6:30 PM - 7:30 PM
About
Join us over a drink at The Moat for our first Next Big Thing event for 2023, and celebrate and support new work from exciting writing talents.
Paul Dalgarno revisits the past to hope for the future in A Country of Eternal Light; J.R. Burgmann’s debut novel Children of Tomorrow weaves climate fiction with a multi-generational family saga; Zoya Patel explores the power of the past and present to bond and disconnect us in Once a Stranger; More Than These Bones follows Bebe Backhouse’s journey through Blak queer identity, heartbreak and self-discovery; and Monique Nair maps family lineages through bodies of water in her Voiceworks piece, ‘Auto-Oceanography: A Lineage Between Bodies of Water’.
The Next Big Thing
The Next Big Thing takes place every month at the Moat and is a cherished Melbourne institution. It’s the place to be if you want to hear great emerging writers read from new and adventurous work.
Featuring
J.R. Burgmann
J.R. Burgmann is a British-Australian emerging writer and critic. He is a graduate of the University of Melbourne and received his PhD in Literary and Cultural Studies from Monash University, where he is based at the Monash Climate Change Communication Research Hub. His co-authored monograph Science Fiction and Climate Change: A Sociological Approach (Liverpool University Press, 2020) was shortlisted for the British Science Fiction Association Award 2020 and Locus Award 2021. Children of Tomorrow, his debut novel, was highly commended in the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards 2021 in the category of unpublished manuscripts. In 2022 he was awarded a Wheeler Centre Fellowship to commence work on his second novel Abominable.
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Paul Dalgarno
Paul Dalgarno is an author and journalist. He was deputy editor of The Conversation (Australia) and a senior writer and features editor at the Herald newspaper group (UK). He has written for The Guardian, Archer and Australian Book Review, and is currently managing editor of ScreenHub. He is also the author of And You May Find Yourself (Sleepers, 2015), Poly (Ventura, 2020) and Prudish Nation (Upswell Publishing, 2023).
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Monique Nair
Monique Nair is a Naarm based writer and editor of Indian-Italian-Polish heritage. She edits for Mascara Literary Review and is the co-editor of the journal's debut anthology Resilience published with Ultimo Press. She participated in the West Writers program with Footscray Community Arts and is a screenwriter for My Melbourne, a VicScreen and Mind Blowing Films international short film initiative. She has performed poetry for Emerging Writers Festival and her writing is published in Peril, The Indian Weekly and Voiceworks. Her work explores diaspora experiences, coming-of-age narratives and questions of identity and meaning.
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Zoya Patel
Zoya Patel is the author of No Country Woman (Hachette, 2018), and Once A Stranger (Hachette, 2023). She is co-host of The Guardian's Book It In podcast, and the Margin Notes podcast alongside Yen Eriksen. Zoya is a columnist for the RiotACT, and regular books critic and writer for The Guardian, Canberra Times, SBS Voices, Refinery29 and more. Zoya has won numerous awards for her writing and editing, and she was a 2020 judge for the Stella Prize and Chair of the 2021 Stella Prize judging panel.
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